After that I stole away with a bruised heart and downcast spirit, not daring to ask a question of any one, fearful lest what I had so unerringly divined would be confirmed, I did not wish to hear the dread and terrible word pronounced. . . . * * * * * For a long time thereafter little silken sachet bags were always associated in my mind with the idea of death. CHAPTER XVIII. I still have in my memory, almost agonizing impressions of a serious illness which I had when I was about eight years old. Those about me called it scarlet fever, and its very name seemed to have a diabolical quality. I had the fever in March, which was cold and blustering and dreary that year, and every evening as night fell, if by chance my mother was not near me, a great sadness would overwhelm my soul. (It was an oppression coming on at twilight, from which animals, and beings with a temperament like mine suffer almost equally.) My curtains were kept open, and I always had a view of the pathetic looking little table with its cups of gruel and bottles of medicines. And as I gazed at these things, so suggestive of sickness, they took on strange shapes in the darkness of the silent room,--and at such times there passed through my head a procession of grotesque, hideous and alarming images. Upon two successive evenings at dusk there appeared to me, in the half delirium of fever, two persons who caused me the most extreme terror. The first one was an old woman, hump-backed and very ugly, but with a fascinating ugliness, who without my hearing her open the door, without my seeing any one rise to meet her, stole noiselessly to my side. She departed, however, without speaking to me; but as she turned to go her hump became visible, and I saw that there was an opening in it, and there popped out from this hole the green head of a parrot which the old woman carried in her hump. This creature called out, “Cuckoo,” in a thin, squeaking, far-away voice, and then withdrew again into the frightful old hag's hump. Oh! when I heard that “Cuckoo!” a cold perspiration formed on my forehead; but suddenly the woman disappeared and then I realized that it was only a dream.